Helen Guri, Match

Since discovering her work in an issue of The Antigonish Review a couple of years back [see my review of such here, and further mention here], I’ve been anticipating what Toronto poet Helen Guri would come up with as her first trade poetry collection, finally published as Match (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2011). The poems in Match are damned sharp, as Guri writes a collection of compelling poems about love and (as the back cover informs), through “the voice of the emotionally challenged modern male” and his love for his “110-pound fully operational sex doll, ordered over the internet.” Doesn't this feel like an echo or shade of that strange and compassionate Ryan Gosling film, Lars and the Real Girl (2007)? This collection reads much as a novel-in-poems, a lyric tale told in densely-packed lines exploring the relationship between the fictional Robert Brand and his artificial companion, and the relationship’s emotional turns from every possible angle. Is love any less real, here? Still, it's hard to tell sometimes if this collection is a furthering or simply a retelling/re-imagining of Gosling's own Lars. Where does light gallop in?

COGNITION

My brainwave is the size of an arena –

please grab a seat.

Watch the mystery run laps

through a device

composed solely of antiquated childhood games

an ancient pains:

a crescendo of dominoes

sets off a model train; conductorless,

a flashlight’s plasma siren

burrows through textbook

migraines, refracts in a rat trap

below the buzzer – which one,

what colour?

Keep your ears pricked as baskets

for the unmapped sound, for the crash

landing of a tossed girl.

Let your cogs be a crowd in a wave

of plough and follow.

In a suite of three poems and introductory poem, “Apocalypse Wedding,” the sharpest pieces here are often those in which she uses the fewest words, cutting here and then here to say the same in the least. Damned sharp, as I said, but why this slew of poetry collections that keep insisting on telling us stories? Why not simply poems?

With hints of the surreal, of the fantastic, Guri’s poems turn a perspective that might sound like obsession, like madness, into something more breathtaking, and even impossible: something sounding like love, perhaps. Just listen to this, the second section of the three-part poem “RUBBER BRIDE,” a poem that begins with a quote from Louise Glück (“The beloved / lives in the head.):

People at work began to notice

my smell of must and rumpled lilac,

how my eyes were tumblers where trapped goldfish paced.

The chronic tinnitus of your shower opera

was embarrassingly loud in public places.

But when I called the city to get a permit for your removal,

they told me you’d been designated a World Heritage Site.

The tourists came with cameras, prams, ham-sandwich luncheons,

first editions of certain folk tales for signing.

Their kids playing chicken in the intermittent drip

of mood light from the windows.

I took work in maintenance –

sank my pincers into litter,

mowed the acreage with a ride-on

while you let out a feral howl

in perfect pitch with my petroleum drone.

The children flocked and scattered.

It was not long before I turned into a cat

and you flicked paper mice between the shutter slats

on fly-rods. You knit your golden hair in windsocks,

I ran into a paper bag.

Helen Guri reads in Ottawa as part of the ottawa international writers festival Coach House Books event on Saturday, April 30, 2011;

Event: new & established writers, no. 37.3

I’ve kept every reciept—an act
of devotion: paper remembers
what we can’t. (Helen Guri, “Marriage: Late Days”)

Going through Myrna Kostash’s stack of books on her writing desk, I started reading the most recent issue of Vancouver’s Event magazine, subtitled “Creative Non-Fiction Contest Issue.” It’s been a few years since I’ve picked up an issue, and I’m glad I finally did, with a number of memorable pieces inside (there are some George Bowering poems inside I was rather fond of, but formatting prevents me from replicating such). Otherwise, I’m always amazed at what Montreal writer David McGimpsey [see my review of his last poetry collection here] accomplishes with his poems, mixing the sonnet with pop culture, and “low” culture at that, equally amazed that he doesn’t get more credit for such.

Britney Beaver Shots Lead Us to Victory in Iraq!

Destroyed is the dance floor with Britney,
destroyed are the girls in her limo,
and in their shoulder-walks past lux
paparazzi—b-chh, b-chh—
like the summer of Oahu sunlight
as Queen Liliuokalani languished in jail
aloha e. I have drunk Brit’s cigarette blend,
have injected all stickety pois
and a voice told me ‘Governor General’s Award.’
Britney talked to me there of ‘Whatever’
and we were there together: Britney
loaded and pantyless and the poet struggling
(ka poe kahiko) with a burdensome secret,
which is the same death as Capt. Cook’s
in two feet of water.

I remember being previously intrigued with the poetry of the mysterious Helen Guri; at least the biographical information at the back of this journal gives me a bit more information than I knew previously, apparently she’s working on a collection of “linked poems about a man who falls in love with a doll,” and earned her MA at the University of Toronto, working with George Elliott Clarke. In her two poems here, “The Cactus” is a stronger poem as a whole, but there are lines in her “Marriage: Late Days” that manage to break me; I want to keep my eye on where this one is going. If you’re out there, Helen Guri, I think you and I should be discussing a potential chapbook, perhaps, for sometime over the next year?

For Ottawa poet Rob Winger, the ghazals he’s been publishing lately (including a couple in the fifth issue of ottawater) have been my favourite of his writing so far [see my review of his first book here], and some of the strongest pieces I’ve seen from anyone in a while.

Ghazal for Retuning John Thompson
The proper response to a poem is another poem.
-- Phyllis Webb

listen, John: of course they didn’t care about poems,
about your hunting knife.

the dykes hold, and birds. here you go: this breeze.
water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

last few Wood Point fence posts: brown knots, brown mud.
the tides could sure as hell care less about us.

Sackville burns, a Bridge Street smoke funnel.
your orange ghost in the sewer.

along High Marsh trails: rose of Sharon, rose, broken bridge.
in Slack’s Cove blueberry fields, a nineteenth-century cairn.

ropes on Hart Hall. corner floorboards. the shot clock, and Tobin.
love is the office you left, filled with theory.

radio towers and the weather continues, filling cuffs & conversations—
a train slipping its glass track.

time to split wood, dive deep, surface:
At the edge of the chopiing there are no secrets.

here’s to Polaris and goal posts, gravestones, narcissus.
here’s to a final line that’s Yeats, finished: the dawn.

(when the fire’s done,
who holds onto ashes?)

At a recent reading at the Plan 99 series at Ottawa’s Manx Pub, where he opened for Shani Mootoo, Winger read a number of his new ghazals, and nearly apologized for the non-linear, non-logical sense of the pieces, and the form as a whole. I think there is something in the form, and in his poems specifically, that somehow transcends what he has accomplished previously. In his ghazals (I know Winger is deeply influenced by John Thompson’s posthumous Stilt jack collection), he comes to something that the rest of his work hasn’t yet, something magnificent and impossible to describe. I hope he keeps going in this direction. I am very taken with it.

Saskatoon fiction writer J. Jill Robinson is a one I haven’t really spent any time with previously, so I was pleased to read such a compelling piece, “The Letter” being one of the winners of their “creative non-fiction contest,” judged by Vancouver writer Timothy Taylor. Robinson’s is a compelling piece about meeting her grown son for the first time, put up for adoption as a baby when she was still a teen. A number of writers over the years have written on various aspects of adoption, from the birth parent, adoptive parent, and child, including Janice Williamson, Lynn Coady, Susan M. Schultz and Alison Gresik, as well as a couple of anthologies that have appeared lately (I’ve even been working to put one together for Chaudiere Books). The stories that come out are good and bad, heartbreaking and heartwarming, running the emotional gamut that only familial relationships can provide. Fortunately, Robinson’s is one of the fortunate stories. The piece begins with a letter, sent from Robinson to her son as first contact, not knowing what might happen, and moves through a distance of months, to the openings of something new, ending with:

It’s a paradox. David and I have this most intimate of physical bonds, but we do not know each other. We share the briefest of histories, aside from the long, enduring histories of Gordy’s and my families. Our lives have no connective tissue made of the dailiness of life, only that which we are creating now. I often feel lame, at a loss. When we talk the desire stilts our words. At night in bed I am frustrated with myself: I want to know how to be, want to know what my role here is so that I can follow it, but there are no guidelines and I find myself stumbling, and trying too hard. We are better just walking slowly.

By the time we hug each other goodbye I know that David and I will never again be suspended in time. We will remain in motion, stepping forward more than back.

ongoing notes: late September, 2008

[Wedding cake, etcetera, from the wedding I was at yesterday; more pictures here] By now, you've probably see that magnificent piece that Margaret Atwood published in the Globe & Mail, the same day as my own blog write-up on same, responding to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Sigh. If it ain't one thing, it's something else. In happier news, plenty of upcoming events in Ottawa and even in Edmonton on the sidebar (look slightly to the right to check them out), including two small press book fairs happening in the capital this fall, including the ottawa international writers festival, starting October 18th with a mini-small press book fair. What the?

Armstrong BC: It's always good to see new things by kevin mcpherson eckhoff's bytheskinofmeteeth, producing short hand-bound runs of poetry chapbooks, most recently Calgary writer Helen Hajnoczky's tea cosy (2008). She's been publishing in journals for some time, so it's about time something larger, albeit only slightly, appears in print. Will there be something further down that there road?

A Portrait of Gertrude Stein

I find her incredibly irritating.
I've read her before in other
classes and I just find her so
annoying, and I think that if I
understood better what she was
trying to do or why she writes
this way that maybe I would find
her less annoying, but she is so
irritating because I really just
don't understand what she is
doing, and if I just understood
her intentionality then I think I
would like her more, but I find
her really irritating because I
don’t understand what she's
doing and so it's just really
annoying, which I think I would
not feel as much if I knew what
she was doing, but it's just so
irritating.

St. Catharine's ON: For some time, poet Gregory Betts has been on about plunderverse [see his essay on such here, at poetics.ca], and written a number of projects based on the idea of using only the words of someone else's work, and only in the order in which the original author has used. A project of selection, his most recent example of such is the chapbook The Others Raisd in Me (St John's NL: Trainwreck Press, 2008), produced by the same enterprise that also produces the online Ditch Poetry.

1.

what power this we
in my art.

make me sigh
swear that
grace is of things.

in my mind -
how to make and see

the others
raised in me.

In this project, Betts has taken only from one piece, writing that "All of the poems in this book were uncovered by crossing out words or letters in William Shakespeare's Sonnet 150." How many pieces can you get out of a single text?

13.

For Bök

how
to how to
do north of
to stroll to
howl

how to
hold worth

to loot

Madison WI: The third issue of Cannot Exist came into my mailbox, edited by Andy Gricevich, with poems by Alex Burford, Mark Cunningham, Carrie Etter, Lawrence Giffin, William Gillespie, Kevin Killian, Mark Lamoureux, Bonnie Jean Michalski, Sheila E. Murphy, Andy Nicholson and Dirk Stratton. I've always been a fan of what Sheila E. Murphy has done, but what really jumped out at me from this issue are the pieces by Kevin Killian, a healthy section of his poems that seems to be titled "Cannot Exist." How can I get to see more?

Five Years In

to a war that never ends,
I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies

US 30 million dollars an acre they say
of liberating a solid gold mine,
and the sold trinkets of the astor ray
Slither up from the eagle's nest, sold

Nemo, with your wet leather suit tugged,
I kiss you, I want you to walk
there are two great factors that you can see,

Underwater

For further information, write c/o Andy Gricevich, 3417 Stevens Street, Madison WI 53705, or check out http://www.cannotexist.blogspot.com/

Antigonish NS: It's not that often that a poem in a journal really jumps out at me and refuses to let go, but there was just something about Helen Guri's poem "Self-Portrait of my Brain as Five Raccoons" from The Antigonish Review #154. Just who is this Helen Guri? According to her contributor bio at the end of the issue, she's working on a novel-in-verse, lives in Toronto, and has published in a series of other journals, including Arc, Grain and Room of One's Own. Who is this Helen Guri?

2.

In each
blown hollow

of the skull
an idea

preens. Turns,
sinks, unravels

as cornsilk,
damp corrugate.

Scrap-weary, licked
inky, belly heavy

in the ivy.
Even a raccoon

must sleep
must sleep.